New Geography

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  • The Rise of the Third Coast

    In the wilds of Louisiana’s St. James Parish, amid the alligators and sugar plantations, Lester Hart is building the $750 million steel plant of his dreams. Over the past decade, Hart has constructed plants for steel producer Nucor everywhere from Trinidad to North Carolina. Today, he says, Nucor sees its big opportunities here, along the banks of the Mississippi River, roughly an hour west of New Orleans by car.

    “The political climate here is conducive to growth,” Hart explains as he steers his truck up to the edge of a steep levee. “We are here because so much is going on in this state and this region. With the growth of the petrochemical and industrial sectors, this is the place to be.” Already, some 500 people are working on the project. When completed in 2013, the plant—which is expected to process more than 3.75 million tons of iron ore a year—will create about 150 permanent jobs immediately. Another 150 are expected after a second development phase.

    Nucor isn’t alone in coming to Louisiana, or to the vast, emerging region along the Gulf Coast. The American economy, long dominated by the East and West Coasts, is undergoing a dramatic geographic shift toward this area. The country’s next great megacity, Houston, is here; so is a resurgent New Orleans, as well as other growing port cities that serve as gateways to Latin America and beyond. While the other two coasts struggle with economic stagnation and dysfunctional politics, the Third Coast—the urbanized, broadly coastal region spanning the Gulf from Brownsville, Texas, to greater Tampa—is emerging as a center of industry, innovation, and economic growth.

    The Gulf area long lacked industry. Even when the Spaniards and the French ruled it, the Gulf was a planters’ region, and its economy was largely dependent on exports of indigo, sugar, and cotton. The economy also relied on the slave labor that made such exports possible, a state of affairs that continued until the Civil War. After the war, the region therefore lost much of its economic influence as growth shifted to the rail-dominated east-west axis, though the construction of the Panama Canal eventually helped New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, again become busy ports. Developing slowly, the Third Coast’s agricultural economy was dominated largely by tenant farmers, who in 1930 constituted more than 60 percent of the agricultural producers in an arc from Texas to Georgia.

    The Gulf region also suffered from vulnerability to natural disasters. In 1900, more than a century before Katrina, the deadliest hurricane in American history all but destroyed Galveston, Texas. In 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood inundated a 27,000-square-mile area, much of it in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. And then there was the hot and humid climate, especially miserable in those pre-air-conditioning days.

    What Joel Garreau, in his landmark book The Nine Nations of North America, writes about the South as a whole—that it became a “region identified with stagnation—backward, rural, poor and racist, a colony of the industrialized north, enamored of an allegedly glorious past of dubious authenticity”—applied with particular force to the Gulf Coast, whose major cities, especially New Orleans, were seen as hopelessly corrupt and decadent. It’s no surprise that for much of the last century, the region exported people, particularly those with skills, to other parts of the United States.

    So it’s particularly striking that the region’s steady economic growth is now attracting so many people. Over the past decade, Texas and Florida have ranked first and second among the states in net domestic immigration, combining for a gain of roughly 2 million people. Together, Houston and Tampa have gained more than 1.5 million people over the course of the decade; in fact, in 2008 and 2009, net domestic migration to Houston was the highest of any major metropolitan area. An examination of migration flows to Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa by Praxis Strategy Group, where I work as a senior consultant, shows that many of their new citizens are coming from the East and West Coasts, especially New York and California. Also over the past decade, Houston has attracted as many foreign immigrants, relative to its population, as New York has—a considerably higher rate than in such historical immigration hubs as Chicago, Seattle, and Boston, though still lower than in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.

    What’s more, the Third Coast is winning the battle of the brains. Over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau, 300,000 people with bachelor’s degrees have relocated to Houston. Between 2007 and 2009, as demographer Wendell Cox has chronicled, New Orleans—which had hemorrhaged educated people for the previous few decades—enjoyed the largest-percentage gain of educated people of any metropolitan area with a population of over 1 million. The New York Times reported in 2010 that Tulane University, the city’s premier higher-education establishment, had received nearly 44,000 applications, more than any other private school in the country. The largest group of applicants came not from Louisiana but from California, with New York and Texas not far behind.

    Thanks to all this immigration, the population of the Third Coast has grown 14 percent over the past decade, more than twice the national average. The growth continued even when the Great Recession struck in 2008. Between 2008 and 2011, Houston grew by 6.7 percent, according to census estimates, while New Orleans expanded by 6.9 percent; over the same period, the nation’s population increased by only 2.5 percent. New Orleans, the biggest population loser in the first half of the last decade, is now the fastest-growing U.S. metropolitan region. Many smaller cities in the region—Brownsville, Gulfport, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge, for example—have also grown faster than the national average. Overall, the Gulf region is expected to be home to 61.4 million people by 2025, according to the Census Bureau.

    Many of the region’s new arrivals are attracted by the low cost of living. The median home-price-to-income ratio in Houston, Tampa, and New Orleans is roughly one-half that of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or San Jose. Over the last decade, Houston boasted the highest growth in personal income of any of the country’s 75 largest metropolitan areas.

    The region’s most dramatic appeal, however, is its remarkable employment growth. Between 2001 and 2012, the number of jobs along the Third Coast, according to Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI), increased by 7.6 percent, well over three times the national growth rate. The vitality of the Third Coast persisted even during a brutal recession, with four metropolitan areas—Houston, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and New Orleans—gaining jobs between 2008 and 2012, even as the nation’s job rolls shrank by 3.6 percent. Of the three states that have recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, two—Texas and Louisiana—are on the Third Coast.

    The region’s job-creation engine is powered by the growth of basic industries: manufacturing, energy, and agricultural commodities. The region from south Texas to Florida now bristles with scores of new steel plants, petrochemical facilities, and factories producing everything from airplanes to canned food. Along with the Great Plains and the Intermountain West, the Gulf Coast has enjoyed a huge boost from energy and other commodity growth. Over the past decade, Texas alone has added nearly 200,000 oil- and gas-sector jobs, with an average salary of about $75,000. Thanks largely to expansion in energy, manufacturing, and engineering services, Houston now boasts a considerably higher per-capita concentration of STEM jobs—those relating to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics—than Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, according to an analysis by EMSI.

    The magazine Site Selection says that four of the Gulf states are among the nation’s 12 most attractive states to investors: Texas topped the list, with Louisiana ranking seventh, Florida tenth, and Alabama 12th. Texas and Louisiana also ranked first and third among the 50 states in terms of new plants built or being constructed. “There’s been a drastic change in the business climate here,” says Chris McCarty, director of the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “A lot of regulations have been moved aside, and there’s a big push by the state to get out of the way.”

    Energy is the key driver. The Third Coast already accounts for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s oil and gas employment, despite the federal crackdown on offshore drilling after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The region boasts new shale plays, such as those now being developed in northern Louisiana, and massive crude reserves, which follow the arc of the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to New Orleans.

    The future for American energy is bright. According to the consultancy PFC Energy, the United States is on course to surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil and gas producer sometime during this decade. With the Atlantic and Pacific coasts either banning or sharply curtailing energy production, the Gulf’s pro-business, right-to-work states have emerged as the likely staging ground for this energy resurgence. Here, unlike in California or New York, support for energy development tends to be highly bipartisan. Third Coast Democrats—such as Louisiana U.S. senator Mary Landrieu, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (her brother), and Houston mayor Annise Parker—can be as ferocious in their defense of the industry as any Republican. “Texas and Louisiana understand the oil business,” says Ralph Phillip, vice president of a Valero oil refinery located just a few miles from the rising Nucor steel plant. “They understand what this industry is all about and expect you to manage the risks. If you want to do a permit in California, they won’t return your call. But here they want everything to work.”

    Not only does the energy industry employ people and pay them well; the effect works in reverse, too, with a growing pool of skilled workers offering companies like Nucor and Valero a compelling reason to expand into the Third Coast. “When you are building a petrochemical facility, you have a great need for skills in such things as maintenance and construction,” Phillip points out. “If you open up in another part of the country, you have to bring in people to run things. Here, the skills are all over the Gulf.”

    Another important part of the region’s economy is exports, since trade patterns are shifting away from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and toward the Gulf. Since 2003, the Third Coast’s total exports have tripled in value, and its share of total American exports has grown from roughly 10 percent to nearly 16 percent. Last year, trade reached record levels at the Port of New Orleans, says Donald van de Werken, director of the U.S. Export Assistance Center in that city. Louisiana has become a dominant player in the agricultural-export industry, with half of the nation’s grain exports going through the state’s ports. Houston now ranks as the top port in the United States in terms of total value of exports; New Orleans ranks fifth.

    The trends favoring the Third Coast will accelerate further once the $5.25 billion Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2014, as I pointed out in Forbes last year. The wider canal will be able to accommodate Asian megaships, which are currently forced to dock in California. That will open the Gulf to more Pacific trade, since most northeastern and West Coast ports have been reluctant to make the necessary capital investments to capture it. China’s abandonment of the Maoist ideal of self-sufficiency and its growing willingness to rely on imports of food and other items represent a huge opportunity for the region.

    When Garreau published Nine Nations 30-some years ago, he predicted that as growth kicked in, the Gulf region would “clot” into an archipelago of cities similar to the Boston–New York–Washington megalopolis, or to the band stretching from San Diego through Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle. If he proves right, Houston will be the hub of this new system, much as New York anchors the East Coast and Los Angeles the West.

    The greater Houston metropolitan area is one of the fastest-growing in the country; its population, now 6 million, is expected to double over the next 20 years. Houston is also the nation’s third-largest manufacturing city, behind New York and Chicago. Over the past decade, the city and its surrounding communities have added almost 20,000 heavy-manufacturing jobs, the most of any metropolitan area in the United States. Further, Houston has the third-largest representation of consular offices, after Los Angeles and New York, and it hosts more Fortune 500 companies—22, as of 2011—than any city other than Gotham. Over the past half-century, says Federal Reserve economist Bill Gilmer, Houston has consolidated its position as the center of the global fossil-fuel industry. In 1960, Houston was home to just one of the nation’s large energy firms, ranking well behind New York, Los Angeles, and even Tulsa; by 2007, 16 such companies were headquartered in Houston, more than in those three cities combined.

    The burgeoning health-care industry is also finding a home in Houston, especially at the Texas Medical Center—“the largest medical complex in the world,” its website boasts. Like so many things in Houston, this cluster of 48 nonprofit hospitals, colleges, and universities owes its existence largely to the energy industry. According to its chief executive, Richard Wainerdi, the center benefits from “probably the biggest confluence of philanthropy in the world, and a lot of it is oil money.” Every day, 160,000 people enter the vast campus, equal in size to Chicago’s downtown Loop; its office space, now over 28.3 million square feet, exceeds not only that of downtown Houston but also that of downtown Los Angeles. The figure is expected to surpass 41 million square feet by the end of 2014, making the center the seventh-largest business district in the nation.

    Houston’s solid business climate empowers entrepreneurs. Between 2008 and 2011, according to a study by EMSI, the number of self-employed workers grew more quickly in Houston than in any other large metropolitan area. Greater numbers of educated workers are coming, too: Houston’s total increase in people with bachelor’s degrees over the past decade bested Philadelphia’s, was three times that of San Jose, and was twice that of San Diego. “I don’t get the pushback I used to get” from potential recruits, says Chris Schoettelkotte, who founded Manhattan Resources, a Houston-based executive-recruiting firm, 13 years ago. “You try to find a city with a better economy and better job prospects than us!”

    Though Houston has always been a good place to do business, it continues to suffer from a bad cultural image. In 1946, journalist John Gunther described Houston as a place “where few people think about anything but money.” It was, he added, “the noisiest city” in the nation, “with a residential section mostly ugly and barren, a city without a single good restaurant and of hotels with cockroaches.” The miserable city that Gunther described no longer exists, but residents on the other two coasts have been slow to acknowledge that development, despite Houston’s first-class museums and lively restaurant scene. “Let’s face it, we have a bad reputation,” says L. E. Simmons, a legendary Houston energy investor. “But the good news is, it keeps the stylish opportunists out. It makes us kind of an urban secret.”

    Houston’s cultural weakness—more perceived than real these days—has long been New Orleans’s strong suit. Yet the Big Easy’s long-standing appeal to artists, musicians, and writers did little to dispel the city’s image as merely a tourist haven, and a poor one at that. The problem, as Hurricane Katrina made all too plain, was a corrupt city plagued by enormous class and racial divisions and one of the lowest average wages in the country. The city’s urban core continues to endure one of the highest violent-crime rates in the nation.

    Though energy is responsible for much of New Orleans’s recent economic growth, the city has also begun attracting the information industry. Since 2005, New Orleans’s tech employment has surged by 19 percent, more than six times the national average. And at a time when movie production has dropped nationally, Louisiana has nearly tripled its production of motion pictures, from 33 per year in 2002–07 to 92 per year in 2008–10.

    East of New Orleans, Mobile has a different strength: manufacturing. Nearly 1.5 million cars and trucks are made within four hours of the city. In fact, the Third Coast, together with the adjacent southeastern manufacturing belt, is now competing with the Great Lakes as the center of the automotive industry. And Tampa, with robust population growth and Florida’s largest port—including a container terminal expanding from 40 acres to 160 acres—is poised perfectly to take advantage of any opening of Cuba, a country with which the city has had a long economic relationship.

    The region’s ascendancy, however, faces significant impediments. Gilmer says that the greatest risk to growth comes from Washington, especially if a second-term Obama administration cracks down even more aggressively on offshore oil development. Federal regulators’ reluctance to let drilling resume in the wake of the BP oil spill ruined hundreds of New Orleans–area businesses. Potentially strict new controls on extracting gas by means of hydraulic fracturing could slow the energy boom further, which in turn would derail the expansion of petrochemical and other manufacturing facilities.

    Perhaps more troubling are social problems, some the legacy of centuries of underdevelopment. Despite the influx of skilled and college-educated workers, Third Coast states continue to lag in college graduation rates and the percentage of their adult populations with college degrees. Of the 18 metropolitan areas across the Third Coast, only two—Tallahassee and Houston—have a higher percentage of college grads than the national average of 30 percent. When you rank states by their students’ proficiency in math and science, only one Third Coast state—Texas—sits near the middle of the list. Efforts to reform public education—notably, Louisiana’s new statewide voucher program and aggressive expansion of charter schools—offer some hope of addressing these weaknesses. In a new report, government efficiency expert David Osborne describes New Orleans’s reforms as a “breakthrough.” The results, he says, are “spectacular: test scores, graduation rates, college-going rates, and public approval have more than doubled in five years.” He adds, “I believe this is the single most important experiment in American education today.”

    And the obstacles facing the Third Coast today aren’t so different from those that once confronted other American economic dynamos. In the nineteenth century, New York was seen as a hopelessly corrupt sewer. In the early twentieth century, Los Angeles was dismissed as superficial and equally corrupt, with only one industry: fantasy. Few would make those claims today.

    It is much the same with the Third Coast. Weather, education, and, in some places, a legacy of corruption still present considerable challenges to its ascendancy. But if the region can surmount these challenges—and it appears to be succeeding at this—the Third Coast could become one of the major forces in twenty-first-century America.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared at The City Journal.

    New Orleans photo by Bigstock.

    Joel Kotkin is a City Journal contributing editor and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.

  • The Cities Where A Paycheck Stretches The Furthest

    When we think of places with high salaries, big metro areas like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco are usually the first to spring to mind. Or cities with the biggest concentrations of educated workers, such as Boston.

    But wages are just one part of the equation — high prices in those East and West Coast cities mean the fat paychecks aren’t necessarily getting the locals ahead. When cost of living is factored in, most of the places that boast the highest effective pay turn out to be in the less celebrated and less expensive middle part of the country. My colleague Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group and I looked at the average annual wages in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan statistical areas and adjusted incomes by the cost of living. The results were surprising and revealing.

    In first place is Houston, where the average annual wage in 2011 was $59,838, eighth highest in the nation. What puts Houston at the top of the list is the region’s relatively low cost of living, which includes such things as consumer prices and services, utilities and transportation costs and, most importantly, housing prices: The ratio of the median home price to median annual household income in Houston is only 2.9, remarkably low for such a dynamic urban region; in San Francisco a house goes for 6.7 times the median local household income. Adjusted for cost of living, the average Houston wage of $59,838 is worth $66,933, tops in the nation.

    Most of the rest of the top 10 are relatively buoyant economies with relatively low costs of living. These include Dallas-Fort Worth (fifth), Charlotte, N.C. (sixth), Cincinnati (seventh), Austin, Texas (eighth), and Columbus, Ohio (10th). These areas all also have housing affordability rates below 3.0 except for Austin, which clocks in at 3.5. Similar  situations down the list include such mid-sized cities as  Nashville, (11th), St.Louis (12th), Pittsburgh, (13th), Denver (15th) and New Orleans (16th).

    One major surprise is the metro area in third place: Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich. This can be explained by the relatively high wages paid in the resurgent auto industry and, as we have reported earlier, a huge surge in well-paying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math-related) jobs. Combine this with some of the most affordable housing in the nation and sizable reductions in unemployment — down 5% in Michigan over the past two years, the largest such drop in the nation. This longtime sad sack region has reason to feel hopeful.

    Only two expensive metro areas made our top 10 list. One is Silicon Valley (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara), where the average annual wage last year of $92,556, the highest in the nation, makes up for its high costs, which includes the worst housing affordability among the 51 metro areas we considered: housing prices are nearly 7 times the local median income. Adjusted for cost of living, that $92,556 paycheck is worth $61,581, placing the Valley second on our list.

    In ninth place is Seattle, which placed first on our lists of the cities leading the way in manufacturing and STEM employment growth. Housing costs, while high, are far less than in most coastal California or northeast metropolitan areas.

    What about the places we usually associate with high wages and success? The high pay is offset by exceedingly high costs. Brain-rich Boston has the fifth-highest income of America’s largest metro areas but its high housing and other costs drive it down to 32nd on our list. San Francisco ranks third in average pay at just under $70,000, some $20,000 below San Jose, but has equally high costs. As a result, the metro area ranks a meager 39th on our list.

    Much the same can be said about New York which, like San Francisco, is home to many of the richest Americans and best-paying jobs. The average paycheck clocks in at $69,029, fourth-highest in the country, but high costs, particularly for housing, eat up much of the locals’ pay: adjusted for cost of living, the average salary is worth $44,605. As a result, the Big Apple and its environs rank only 41st on our list.

    Long associated with glitz and glitter, Los Angeles does particularly poorly, coming in 46th on our list. The L.A. metro area may include Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Malibu, but it also is home to South-Central Los Angeles, East L.A. and small, struggling industrial cities surrounding downtown. The relatively modest average paycheck of $55,000 annually, 12th on our list, is eaten up by a cost of living that is well above the national average. This creates an unpleasant reality for many non-celebrity Angelenos.

    Many of the metro areas that rank highly on our list have enjoyed rapid population growth and strong domestic in-migration. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Austin all have been among the leaders the nation in both domestic migration and overall growth both in the last decade and so far in this one. In the past year, for example, Dallas led the nation with 40,000 net migrants while Austin’s population growth, 4 percent, was the highest rate among the large metropolitan areas.

    In contrast, many of the cities toward the bottom of our list — notably the Los Angeles and New York areas — have led the country in domestic outmigration. Between 2000 and 2009, the nation’s cultural capitals lost a total of over 3 million people to other parts of the country. Although migration has slowed in the recession, the pattern has continued since 2010.

    And how about the future? Income and salary growth has been so tepid recently that few large cities can claim to have made big gains over the past five years; there has been continued volatility as some regions that did worst in the past decade — for example San Francisco — pick up steam. Unfortunately any growth in such highly regulated areas also tends to increase costs rapidly, particularly for housing. In California, this is made much worse by both soaring taxes and a regulatory regime that drives up costs faster than income games.

    Similarly these high prices seem to have the effect of driving out middle-class workers; places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have extraordinary concentrations of both rich and poor workers but fewer in the middle. As we pointed out in our annual job and STEM rankings, many technology, manufacturing and business service jobs are heading not to the hotspots but more to the central part of the country.

    Over time, it seems clear that, for the most part, the best prospects for the future lie in places that both experience income and employment gains but remain relatively affordable. These include some cities that didn’t crack the top 10 of our list but appear to be gaining ground, such as Nashville, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Antonio and New Orleans, a once beleaguered city that has experienced the nation’s fastest per capita personal income growth since 2005.

    Maintaining affordability and a wide range of high-paying jobs many not be as glamorous a metric for success as the number of hip web startups or the concentration of educated people. But over time it is likely to be about as good a guide to future prospects as we have.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Houston photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

     

    Note: The table below was updated with 2012 data, so it may not match the narrative above discussing 2011 data. Contact Mark Schill at mark@praxissg.com.

    Metropolitan Pay per Job 2012 – Adjusted for Cost of Living
    MSA Name 2012 Avg. Annual Wage Unadj. Rank 2012 Adj Annual Wage Adj. Rank Rank Change
    Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX $67,279 7 $75,256 1 6
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA $107,515 1 $71,534 2 (1)
    Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI $60,503 16 $64,571 3 13
    Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX $60,478 17 $62,867 4 13
    Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX $58,103 19 $62,679 5 14
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR $53,069 36 $61,780 6 30
    Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC $57,506 20 $61,636 7 13
    Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA $58,836 18 $60,844 8 10
    Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA $67,225 8 $60,237 9 (1)
    Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN $54,683 26 $59,828 10 16
    Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN $53,928 30 $59,787 11 19
    Birmingham-Hoover, AL $52,773 37 $59,563 12 25
    St. Louis, MO-IL $54,112 29 $59,398 13 16
    Columbus, OH $53,634 33 $59,395 14 19
    Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, CO $62,021 11 $59,068 15 (4)
    Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV $79,852 2 $58,672 16 (14)
    Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI $62,746 10 $58,477 17 (7)
    Pittsburgh, PA $55,004 24 $58,021 18 6
    New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA $54,636 27 $57,151 19 8
    Salt Lake City, UT $53,901 31 $56,978 20 11
    Raleigh-Cary, NC $53,243 34 $56,762 21 13
    Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI $55,434 22 $55,825 22 0
    Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ $53,835 32 $55,788 23 9
    Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI $61,515 14 $55,645 24 (10)
    Oklahoma City, OK $50,641 42 $55,345 25 17
    Jacksonville, FL $51,763 40 $55,126 26 14
    Richmond, VA $55,065 23 $55,010 27 (4)
    Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL $50,462 43 $54,969 28 15
    Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN $50,385 44 $54,945 29 15
    Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT $67,826 6 $54,787 30 (24)
    Kansas City, MO-KS $54,378 28 $54,706 31 (3)
    Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD $63,615 9 $54,372 32 (23)
    Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH $54,701 25 $53,946 33 (8)
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH $73,267 5 $53,363 34 (29)
    San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA $79,137 3 $52,988 35 (32)
    San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX $49,219 47 $52,867 36 11
    Rochester, NY $51,798 39 $52,533 37 2
    Baltimore-Towson, MD $61,542 13 $51,759 38 (25)
    Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY $50,013 46 $50,723 39 7
    Las Vegas-Paradise, NV $50,378 45 $50,328 40 5
    New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA $77,640 4 $50,169 41 (37)
    Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA $56,134 21 $49,414 42 (21)
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC $51,693 41 $49,091 43 (2)
    Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL $52,357 38 $48,012 44 (6)
    Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL $46,481 48 $47,771 45 3
    San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA $61,149 15 $46,822 46 (31)
    Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA $61,634 12 $46,411 47 (35)
    Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA $53,071 35 $42,254 48 (13)
    Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA $46,084 49 $41,000 49 0
    Indianapolis-Carmel, IN $53,839 No data
    Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA $59,200 No data
    2012 wage data: EMSI Class of Worker, 2012.3
    Cost of living data: C2ER

  • As Filmmaking Surges, New Orleans Challenges Los Angeles

    For generations New Orleans‘ appeal to artists, musicians and writers did little to dispel the city’s image as a poor, albeit fun-loving, bohemian tourism haven. As was made all too evident by Katrina, the city was plagued by enormous class and racial divisions, corruption and some of the lowest average wages in the country.

    Yet recently, the Big Easy and the state of Louisiana have managed to turn the region’s creative energy into something of an economic driver. Aided by generous production incentives, the state has enjoyed among the biggest increases in new film production anywhere in the nation. At a time when production nationally has been down, the number of TV and film productions shot in Louisiana tripled from 33 per year in 2002-2007 to an average of 92 annually in 2008-2010, according to a study by BaxStarr Consulting. Movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Morgan Freeman, Harrison Ford are being made in the state this year.

    Of course many states and cities have thrown money at the film industry, hoping to establish themselves as cultural centers. Texas, Georgia, British Columbia, Toronto and Michigan all wagered millions in tax dollars to lure producers away from Hollywood and the industry’s secondary hub of New York. There were 279 movies shot in New York State in 2009 and 2010. For all its gains, Louisiana still trails far behind the Empire State with 95 film productions in that period.

    Yet New Orleans and Louisiana possess unique assets which make its challenge far more serious than that of other places. A Detroit, Atlanta or Dallas might be a convenient and cost-efficient place to make a film or television show, but they lack the essential cultural richness that can lure creative people to stay. The Big Easy is attracting that type, plus post-production startups, and animation and videogame outfits, giving a broader foundation to the nascent local entertainment industry.

    “This is different,” notes Los Angeles native and longtime Hollywood costumer Wingate Jones, who started Southern Costume Co. last year to cash in on the growth in production in the state. “It’s the combination of the food and the culture that appeals to people. It must have been a lot like what Hollywood was like in the ’20s and ’30s. It’s entrepreneurial and growing like mad.”

    Critically, Jones adds, Louisiana’s unique culture comes without the fancy New York or Malibu price tag. This is a place where small roadside cafes serve up bowls of gumbo, crayfish and shrimp that would cost three to five times as much in New York, the Bay Area or Los Angeles. Excellent music — from rap to jazz to blues and gospel — can be found simply by walking into a bar and paying the price of a couple of beers. And then there are housing costs, roughly half as high, adjusted for income, than the big media centers.

    This mixture of affordability and culture is attracting young people — the raw material of the creative economy — as well as industry veterans like Jones. In 2011, we examined migration patterns of the college-educated and found, to our surprise, that New Orleans was the country’s leading brain magnet. New Orleans was growing its educated base, on a per capita basis, at a far faster rate than much-ballyhooed, self-celebrated places like New York or San Francisco. In fact, its most intense competition was coming from other Southern cities such as Raleigh, Austin and Nashville, the last two of which also share a strong, and unique, regional culture.

    Another sure sign of the city’s growing appeal has been a torrent of applications to Tulane University, the city’s premier institution of higher education. In 2010 the school received 44,000 applications, more than any other private university in the country. The largest group, more than even those from Louisiana, came from California, with New York and Texas not far behind.

    Increasingly, the Big Easy merits comparison not only to the Hollywood of the 1920s but also Greenwich Village of the ’50s, Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s and “grunge” Seattle in the mid-’80s. These, too, were once appealing places that were less expensive, less predictable and more open to cultural outsiders. Now they’re increasingly too pricey and yuppified for creative people bereft of large trust funds.

    Ironically, Katrina provided the critical spark for this transformation. It devastated the torpid, corrupt political and business culture that viewed the arts as quaint and fit only as a selling point for tourists. In its place came more business-minded administrations in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge, the state capital. In both places, economic developers seized on motion pictures, television, commercials and videogames as potential growth industries that fit well with the state’s expanding appeal to this generation’s creators.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    New Orleans Jazz Band photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • Making Waves on the Third Coast

    If you’re looking for some good news in the U.S. economy, you might want to head to the warm, energy rich Gulf Coast. You wouldn’t be alone in making that move; over the past decade the “Third Coast”—extending from south Texas to the Gulf of Mexico—enjoyed 12% job growth, or about twice the national average.

    This is remarkable given that the region was socked with several devastating hurricanes, including Katrina in 2005. New Orleans’ population, for instance, is still well below its pre-Katrina level, although now gaining steadily.

    New Orleans also demonstrates the possibilities. Film production is way up, and the city appears to be emerging as a magnet for video game, commercials, and special effects firms.

    Some of the biggest advances are further along the periphery from New Orleans, often somewhat closer to Baton Rouge. Nucor is constructing a massive new steel mill in Convent, located in St. James Parish about an hour away from New Orleans. Local chemical and oil refinery firms are also expanding and investing in new equipment.

    Yet it’s Houston’s star that is shining brightest. Over the past decade, when the country actually slightly lost jobs, the Houston-Sugarland-Baytown region expanded its employment by over 15%. Since 1990, the number of jobs has risen by 46%, more than twice the national average. Over a period of ten years, the region’s population has soared 26%, the most of any of the country’s largest metro areas, and again better than twice the national norm. Migrants are coming not only from other countries, but from much of the rest of the U.S., particularly the industrial Midwest, Northeast, and California.

    Optimism among businesspeople on the Third Coast is infectious, as can be seen in the expanding footprint of the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest such facility. Much of the money for this amazing complex comes from a similar boom in oil and gas.

    If there’s a negative tone anywhere, it’s about politics. Concerns over continued federal obstacles to responsible expansions in oil and gas production are widespread. There’s a real concern that this year’s elections will lead to a slowdown in orders and future expansion. Let’s hope not.

    This piece first appeared at the National Chamber Foundation Blog.

  • The Best Cities For Technology Jobs

    During tough economic times, technology is often seen as the one bright spot. In the U.S. this past year technology jobs outpaced the overall rate of new employment nearly four times. But if you’re looking for a tech job, you may want to consider searching outside of Silicon Valley. Though the Valley may still be the big enchilada in terms of venture capital and innovation, it hasn’t consistently generated new tech employment.

    Take, for example, Seattle. Out of the 51 largest metro areas in the U.S., the Valley’s longtime tech rival has emerged as our No. 1 region for high-tech growth, based on long- and short-term job numbers. Built on a base of such tech powerhouses as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing, Seattle has enjoyed the steadiest and most sustained tech growth over the past decade. It is followed by Baltimore (No. 2), Columbus, Ohio (No. 3), Raleigh, N.C. (No. 4) and Salt Lake City, Utah (No. 5).

    To determine the best cities for high-tech jobs, we looked at the latest high-tech employment data collected by EMSI, an economic modeling firm. The Praxis Strategy Group‘s Mark Schill charted those areas that have gained the most high-tech manufacturing, software and services jobs over the past 10 years, equally weighting the last five years and the last two. We also included measures of concentration of tech employment in order to make sure we were not giving too much credence to relatively insignificant tech regions. Our definition of high tech industries is based on the one used by TechAmerica, the industry’s largest trade association.

    Despite the Valley’s remarkable concentration of tech jobs — roughly six times the national average — it ranked a modest No. 17 in our survey. This relatively low ranking reflects the little known fact that, even with the recent last dot-com craze sparking over 5% growth over the past two years, the Valley remains the “biggest loser” among the nation’s tech regions, surrendering roughly one quarter of its high -tech jobs — about 80,000 — in the past decade. Only New York City (No. 44) lost more tech jobs during that time.

    In contrast to this pattern of volatility, our top performers have managed to gain jobs steadily in the past decade — and have continued to add new ones in the last two years. In addition to our top five, the only other regions to claim overall tech gains in the last 10 years are Jacksonville, Fla. (No. 6), Washington, D.C. (No. 7), San Bernardino-Riverside, Calif. (No. 9), San Diego, Calif. (No. 9), Indianapolis (No. 11) and Orlando, Fla. (No. 24).

    So what accounts for high-tech success, and where will jobs most likely grow in the next decade? Certainly being home to a major research university makes a big difference. Seattle, Columbus, Raleigh and Salt Lake City all boast major educational and research assets.

    But it’s one thing to produce scientists and engineers; it’s another to generate employment for them over the long term. Clearly for the San Jose metropolitan region (which is home to Stanford) and the much-hyped No. 29 San Francisco area (home to the University of California Medical Center) academic excellence has not translated into steady growth in tech jobs. Over the past decade the Bay Area has given up 40,000 jobs, or 19% of its tech workforce, including a loss of nearly 6,000 in software publishing.

    Or look at the Boston region (ranked No. 22), which arguably boasts the most impressive concentration of research universities in the country. The region did add jobs in research and computer programming, but these were not enough to counter huge losses in telecommunications and electronic component manufacturing. Over the past decade, greater Beantown has given up 18% of its tech jobs, or more than 45,000 positions.

    One possible explanation may lie in costs, including very high housing prices, onerous taxes and a draconian regulatory environment. In tech, company headquarters may remain in the Valley, close to other headquarters and venture firms, but new jobs are often sent either out of the country or to more business friendly regions.

    Just look at the flow of jobs from Bay Area-based companies to places like the Salt Lake area. In the past two years Valley companies such as Twitter, Adobe, eBay, Electronic Arts and Oracle have all expanded into Utah. This region has many appealing assets for Bay Area companies and workers. Salt Lake City is easily accessible by air from California, possesses a well- educated workforce, has reasonable housing costs and offers world-class skiing and other outdoor activities.

    Another huge advantage appears to be closeness to the federal government, which expends hundreds of billions on tech products both hardware and software. This explains why Baltimore, primarily its suburbs, and the D.C. metro area have enjoyed steady tech growth and, under most foreseeable scenarios, likely will continue to do so in the coming years. Both regions have seen large gains in technology services industries, particularly programming, systems design, research, and engineering.

    Yet even business climate, while important, may not be enough to drive tech job growth. Texas ranks highly in most business surveys, including our own, but it did not fare so well in this one. Indeed No. 32 Austin, often thought as the most likely candidate for the next Silicon Valley, lost over 19% of its high-tech jobs over the past decade, including more than 17,000 jobs in semiconductor, computer and circuit board manufacturing. No. 18 Houston did far better, although it has also lost 6% of its tech jobs over the same period due to the cutbacks in the engineering service, a big sector there. Even more shocking: No. 46 Dallas, generally a job-creating dynamo, has seen roughly a quarter of its high-tech jobs go away, due primarily to losses in telecommunications carriers and in manufacturing of communications equipment and electronics.

    How about other potential up and comers for the coming decade? Two potentially big and somewhat surprising winners. The first: Detroit. Though the Motor City area lost 20% of its tech jobs in the past decade (ranking 40th on our list), it still boasts one of the nation’s largest concentrations of tech workers, nearly 50% above the national average. In the past two years, the region has experienced a solid 7.7% increase in technology jobs, the second highest rate of any metro area.

    The Motor City region seems to have some real high-tech mojo. According to the website Dice.com, Detroit has led the nation with the fastest growth in technology job offerings since February — at 101%. This can be traced to the rejuvenated auto industry, which is increasingly dependent on high-tech skills. Manufacturing is increasingly prodigious driver of tech jobs; games and dot-coms are not the only path to technical employment growth. This could mean good news for other Rust Belt cities, such as No. 28 Cincinatti or No. 38 Cleveland, as well as our Midwest standout, Columbus, which could benefit from growth sparked by the local natural gas boom.

    Another potential standout is No. 8 New Orleans, whose tech base remains relatively small but has expanded its tech workforce nearly 10% since 2009 — the highest rate of any of the regions studied. With low costs, a friendly business climate and world-class urban amenities, the Crescent City could emerge as a real player, aided by the growing prominence of research and development around Tulane University. There has also been a recent growing presence of the video game industry in the city.

    Looking forward, however, it makes sense to be cautious about where tech is heading. By its nature, this is a protean industry; the mix of jobs and favored locales tend to change. If the current boom in social media continues, for example, the Bay Area could recover more of its lost jobs and further extend its primacy. Similarly a surge in manufacturing and energy-related technology could be a boon to tech in Houston, Dallas as well as New Orleans. But based on both historic and recent trends, the surest best for future growth still stands with our top five winners, led by the rain-drenched, but prospering Seattle region.

    Best Places for High Tech Growth
    Ranking of 2, 5, and 10 year growth, industry concentration, and 5 and 10 year growth momentum
    Rank Metropolitan Area Rank Score
    1 Seattle  82.2
    2 Baltimore 75.7
    3 Columbus 67.9
    4 Raleigh 63.2
    5 Salt Lake City 60.0
    6 Jacksonville 59.2
    7 Washington, DC 58.9
    8 New Orleans 58.8
    9 Riverside-San Bernardino 58.2
    10 San Diego 56.1
    11 Indianapolis 55.9
    12 Buffalo 55.8
    13 San Antonio 54.0
    14 Charlotte 53.5
    15 St. Louis 51.6
    16 Pittsburgh 50.8
    17 San Jose 50.5
    18 Houston 50.2
    19 Hartford 50.0
    20 Nashville 49.6
    21 Providence 49.2
    22 Boston 48.3
    23 Minneapolis-St. Paul 48.3
    24 Orlando 48.1
    25 Portland 48.1
    26 Philadelphia 47.4
    27 Louisville 47.2
    28 Cincinnati 46.6
    29 San Francisco 46.6
    30 Denver 46.4
    31 Richmond 45.6
    32 Austin 45.1
    33 Atlanta 44.6
    34 Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News 42.4
    35 Memphis 42.2
    36 Milwaukee 41.5
    37 Rochester 41.2
    38 Cleveland 40.9
    39 Phoenix 38.5
    40 Detroit 37.7
    41 Tampa 37.5
    42 Miami 33.2
    43 Sacramento 32.1
    44 New York 31.4
    45 Las Vegas 31.2
    46 Dallas-Fort Worth 31.0
    47 Chicago 30.2
    48 Los Angeles 29.5
    49 Oklahoma City 26.7
    50 Birmingham 23.5
    51 Kansas City 21.6
    Rankings measure employment in 45 high technology manufacturing, services, and software industry sectors.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group perfomed the economic analysis for this piece.

    Seattle photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Next Boom Towns In The U.S.

    What cities are best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming decade?

    To determine the next boom towns in the U.S., with the help of Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, we took the 52 largest metro areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on various data indicating past, present and future vitality.

    We started with job growth, not only looking at performance over the past decade but also focusing on growth in the past two years, to account for the possible long-term effects of the Great Recession. That accounted for roughly one-third of the score.  The other two-thirds were made up of a a broad range of demographic factors, all weighted equally. These included rates of family formation (percentage growth in children 5-17), growth in educated migration, population growth and, finally, a broad measurement of attractiveness to immigrants — as places to settle, make money and start businesses.

    We focused on these demographic factors because college-educated migrants (who also tend to be under 30), new families and immigrants will be critical in shaping the future.  Areas that are rapidly losing young families and low rates of migration among educated migrants are the American equivalents of rapidly aging countries like Japan; those with more sprightly demographics are akin to up and coming countries such as Vietnam.

    Many of our top performers are not surprising. No. 1 Austin, Texas, and No. 2 Raleigh, N.C., have it all demographically: high rates of immigration and migration of educated workers and healthy increases in population and number of children. They are also economic superstars, with job-creation records among the best in the nation.

    Perhaps less expected is the No. 3 ranking for Nashville, Tenn. The country music capital, with its low housing prices and pro-business environment, has experienced rapid growth in educated migrants, where it ranks an impressive fourth in terms of percentage growth. New ethnic groups, such as Latinos and Asians, have doubled in size over the past decade.

    Two advantages Nashville and other rising Southern cities like No. 8 Charlotte, N.C., possess are a mild climate and smaller scale. Even with population growth, they do not suffer the persistent transportation bottlenecks that strangle the older growth hubs. At the same time, these cities are building the infrastructure — roads, cultural institutions and airports — critical to future growth. Charlotte’s bustling airport may never be as big as Atlanta’s Hartsfield, but it serves both major national and international routes.

    Of course, Texas metropolitan areas feature prominently on our list of future boom towns, including No. 4 San Antonio, No. 5 Houston and No. 7 Dallas, which over the past years boasted the biggest jump in new jobs, over 83,000. Aided by relatively low housing prices and buoyant economies, these Lone Star cities have become major hubs for jobs and families.

    And there’s more growth to come. With its strategically located airport, Dallas is emerging as the ideal place for corporate relocations. And Houston, with its burgeoning port and dominance of the world energy business, seems destined to become ever more influential in the coming decade. Both cities have emerged as major immigrant hubs, attracting on newcomers at a rate far higher than old immigrant hubs like Chicago, Boston and Seattle.

    The three other regions in our top 10 represent radically different kinds of places. The Washington, D.C., area (No. 6) sprawls from the District of Columbia through parts of Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. Its great competitive advantage lies in proximity to the federal government, which has helped it enjoy an almost shockingly   ”good recession,” with continuing job growth, including in high-wage science- and technology-related fields, and an improving real estate market.

    Our other two top ten, No. 9 Phoenix, Ariz., and No. 10 Orlando, Fla., have not done well in the recession, but both still have more jobs now than in 2000. Their demographics remain surprisingly robust. Despite some anti-immigrant agitation by local politicians, immigrants still seem to be flocking to both of these states. Known better s as retirement havens, their ranks of children and families have surged over the past decade. Warm weather, pro-business environments and, most critically, a large supply of affordable housing should allow these regions to grow, if not in the overheated fashion of the past, at rates both steadier and more sustainable.

    Sadly, several of the nation’s premier economic regions sit toward the bottom of the list, notably former boom town Los Angeles (No. 47). Los Angeles’ once huge and vibrant industrial sector has shrunk rapidly, in large part the consequence of ever-tightening regulatory burdens. Its once magnetic appeal to educated migrants faded and families are fleeing from persistently high housing prices, poor educational choices and weak employment opportunities. Los Angeles lost over 180,000 children 5 to 17, the largest such drop in the nation.

    Many of L.A.’s traditional rivals — such as Chicago (with which is tied at No. 47), New York City (No. 35) and San Francisco (No. 42) — also did poorly on our prospective list.  To be sure,  they will continue to reap the benefits of existing resources — financial institutions, universities and the presence of leading companies — but their future prospects will be limited by their generally sluggish job creation and aging demographics.

    Of course, even the most exhaustive research cannot fully predict the future. A significant downsizing of the federal government, for example, would slow the D.C. region’s growth. A big fall in energy prices, or tough restrictions of carbon emissions, could hit the Texas cities, particularly Houston, hard. If housing prices stabilize in the Northeast or West Coast, less people will flock to places like Phoenix, Orlando or even Indianapolis (No.11) , Salt Lake City (No. 12) and Columbus (No. 13). One or more of our now lower ranked locales, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, might also decide to reform in order to become more attractive to small businesses and middle class families.

    What is clear is that well-established patterns of job creation and vital demographics will drive future regional growth, not only in the next year, but over the coming decade.  People create economies and they tend to vote with their feet when they choose to locate their families as well as their businesses.  This will prove   more decisive in shaping future growth   than the hip imagery and big city-oriented PR flackery that dominate media coverage of America’s changing regions.

    Cities of the Future Rankings
    Rank Metropolitan Area
    1 Austin, TX
    2 Raleigh, NC
    3 Nashville, TN
    4 San Antonio, TX
    5 Houston, TX
    6 Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV
    7 Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
    8 Charlotte, NC-SC
    8 Phoenix, AZ
    10 Orlando, FL
    11 Indianapolis, IN
    12 Salt Lake City, UT
    13 Columbus, OH
    14 Jacksonville, FL
    15 Atlanta, GA
    16 Las Vegas, NV
    16 Riverside, CA
    18 Portland, OR-WA
    19 Denver, CO
    20 Oklahoma City, OK
    21 Baltimore, MD
    22 Louisville, KY-IN
    22 Richmond, VA
    24 Seattle, WA
    25 Kansas City, MO-KS
    26 San Diego, CA
    27 Miami, FL
    28 Tampa, FL
    29 Sacramento, CA
    30 Birmingham, AL
    31 New Orleans, LA
    32 Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD
    33 Minneapolis, MN-WI
    34 St. Louis, MO-IL
    35 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN
    35 New York, NY-NJ-PA
    37 Boston, MA-NH
    38 Memphis, TN-MS-AR
    39 Pittsburgh, PA
    40 Virginia Beach, VA-NC
    41 Rochester, NY
    42 Buffalo, NY
    42 San Francisco, CA
    44 Hartford, CT
    45 Milwaukee, WI
    45 San Jose, CA
    47 Chicago, IL-IN-WI
    47 Los Angeles, CA
    49 Providence, RI-MA
    50 Detroit, MI
    51 Cleveland, OH

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo by Exothermic Photography

  • The Rise Of The Third Coast: The Gulf Region’s Ascendancy In U.S.

    For most of the nation’s history, the Atlantic region — primarily New York City — has dominated the nation’s trade. In the last few decades of the 20th Century, the Pacific, led by Los Angeles and Long Beach, gained prominence. Now we may be about to see the ascendancy of a third coast: the Gulf, led primarily by Houston but including New Orleans and a host of smaller ports across the regions.

    The 600,000 square mile Gulf region has long been derided for its humid climate, conservative political traditions and vulnerability to natural disasters. Yet despite these factors, the Gulf is destined to emerge as the most economically vibrant of our three coasts. In our rankings of the fastest-growing job markets in the country, six Gulf cities made the top 50: Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville, in Texas; New Orleans; and Gulfport-Biloxi and Pascagoula, in Mississippi. In contrast, just one Pacific port, Anchorage, Alaska, and one small Atlantic port, Portsmouth, N.H., made the cut.

    This reflects a long-term shift of money, power and jobs away from both the North Atlantic and the Pacific to the cities of the Gulf. The Port of Houston, for example, enjoyed a 28.1% jump in foreign trade this year, and trade at Louisiana’s main ports also reached records levels.

    This growth stems from a host of factors ranging from politics, demographics and energy to emerging trade patterns and new technologies. One potential game-changer is the scheduled 2014 $5.25 billion widening of the Panama Canal, which will allow the passage to accommodate ships carrying twice as much cargo as they are able to carry currently. This will open the Gulf to megaships from Pacific Basin ports such as Singapore, Shanghai, Pusan and Kaohsiung, which have mostly sent their cargos to West Coast ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach. Some analysts predict that more than 25% of this traffic could shift to Gulf and South Atlantic ports. “More of Asia will be heading to this part of the world,” says Jimmy Lyons, CEO of the Alabama State Port Authority.

    The area also is getting a big jolt from ascendant Latin America, the Gulf’s historic leading trade partner. Bill Gilmer, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, notes that Latin America is home to many of the world’s fastest-growing economies, with overall growth rates last year exceeding 6.1%. Since 2002 about 56 million people in the region have risen out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

    Trade with Latin American partners — including Mexico — is ramping up growth in Houston as well as other Gulf ports. Brazil, for instance, has risen to become Mobile, Ala.’s leading trade partner.  Latin immigration to virtually all the Gulf cities, including New Orleans, can only strengthen these economic ties.

    The energy industry represents another critical force in the Gulf’s resurgence. It employs at least 55,000 workers in the Gulf, which produces roughly one-quarter of the nation’s natural gas and one-eighth of its oil. Although Houston seems assured of its spot as the focal point of the world fossil fuel industry, oil and gas also boosts numerous economies throughout the region, notably in Corpus Christi and various ports across Southern Louisiana.

    Though the Obama administration puts its bets on subsidizing “green jobs,” traditional energy jobs may prove, in the short and medium term, far more important.  There is even widespread talk about the Gulf emerging as a center for the export of natural gas. Over $ 6 billion in new investments are already being proposed for export facilities, notes David Dismukes, associate director of the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies.

    The energy-related economy produces high-wage jobs that range from geology and engineering to the muscle work on the oil rigs, which provide well above average wages for blue collar workers. Such growth is particularly critical to regions such as New Orleans, long dependent on generally lower-wage industries like hospitality and personal services. The energy business also will help accelerate the expansion of business services such as law, accounting, architecture and advertising.

    The shift to the Gulf includes some rapid industrial expansion, particularly for energy intensive industries. Huge natural gas supplies are creating enormous opportunities for expanding petrochemical industries. The German firm Thyssen Krupp opened a new $5 billion steel mill last year, and Nucor Steel announced a large new facility to be built just outside New Orleans. Like energy production, these facilities tend to pay above-average wages for blue collar workers, which will likely raise living standards for a region that has lagged historically.

    At the same time, demographic trends suggest these areas will continue to become more attractive to international commerce. Despite a legacy of hurricanes and floods, Houston, with over 5 million people, has emerged as among the fastest-growing large metropolitan regions in the country. The region’s population is expected to double in the next 20 years. Most of the economies its port serves — Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin — also have experienced rapid growth. Recoveries are in place in many other hurricane-devastated areas, including greater New Orleans.

    Overall the Gulf is expected to be home to 61.4 million people by 2025, a nearly 50% increase from its 1995 base. This expanding domestic market — along with the possibilities posed by the canal — have already persuaded two larger retailers, Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to establish modern new distribution centers in Houston.

    Finally there is the matter of political will. Both the Northeast and the Pacific regions are increasingly dominated by environmental, labor, urban land and other interests often hostile to wide-ranging industrial expansion.  A legacy of labor unrest, most notably a big strike of West Coast ports in 2002,   convinced some shippers to diversify their operations elsewhere.   Growing regulation in California, suggests economist John Husing, a leading expert on port-related issues, makes the prospects for growing warehouse, logistics and manufacturing jobs increasingly “impossible”  there.

    East Coast ports, subject to some of the same pressures, may be slow to make the “intense capital improvements” required to capture expanding trade. In contrast, the Gulf’s leaders in both parties support   broad based economic growth.  New Orleans’ Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu is no less friendly to industrial and port expansion  than Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. Houston Democratic mayors like Annise Parker, Bill White and Bob Lanier have been as strongly in favor of critical business and infrastructure investment as their Republican counterparts.

    Such differences in attitude have driven power shifts   throughout American economic history. In the 19th century New York through a combination of ruthless ambition and greater vision  overcame aristocratic Boston and more established Philadelphia. Icy Chicago performed a similar coup over its then far more established and temperate rival, St. Louis, in the mid- and late 1800s.

    In the last century, unfashionable Los Angeles, without a great natural port, overcame the grand Pacific dowager San Francisco, blessed by one of the world’s great natural harbors, as the economic center of the West Coast. Los Angeles built a vast new modern and largely artificial port to make up for what nature failed to provide, and also nurtured a host of   industries from aerospace, oil and entertainment to garments.

    Now history is about to repeat itself as Texas, Louisiana and other Gulf Cities seek to reorder the nation’s economic balance of power.  Unless California and the Northeast awaken to the challenge, they will be increasingly supplanted by a region that seems more determined to expand their economic dominion.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

  • The Katrina Effect: Renaissance On The Mississippi

    In this most insipid of recoveries, perhaps the most hopeful story comes from New Orleans. Today, its comeback story could serve as a model of regional recovery for other parts of the country — and even the world.

    You could call it the Katrina effect. A lovely city, rich in history, all too comfortable with its fading elegance and marred by huge pockets of third-world style poverty, suffers a catastrophic natural disaster; in the end the disaster turns into an opportunity for the area’s salvation.

    Had Katrina never occurred New Orleans would likely have continued its inexorable albeit genteel decline; the area’s population dropped from 627,000 in 1960 to 437,000 in 2005, the year the hurricane occured. Instead the disaster brought new energy and a sense of purpose to the Big Easy.

    I first realized that New Orleans was going through some kind of renaissance when looking at some numbers.  In our list of the country’s biggest brain magnets — based on analysis of where college-educated adults were moving to by demographer Wendell Cox —  New Orleans ranked No. 1, ahead of such hot spots as Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Austin, Texas.

    Then came our analysis of the best large cities for jobs: New Orleans ranked No. 2 in our survey, up a remarkable 46 places. New Orleans’ performance was particularly impressive in the information field, which includes software and entertainment, and in which the Big Easy grew the most — over 30% last year alone – among our major metros.

    Yet numbers do not tell the whole story. Sometimes statistics simply look great against the background of catastrophic decline. New Orleans was so far down and received so much recovery money that recent improvements could be explained as a short-term bounce back from a disaster.

    But the resurgence of New Orleans, whose population is now back to almost 350,000, represents something far more significant and long-term. For one thing, the storm undermined the corrupt, inept political regimes that had burdened the area for decades. “Katrina shattered the networks and broke down the old hierarchies,” notes Tim Williamson, a New Orleans native and founder of Idea Village, a nonprofit focused on aiding local entrepreneurs.  ”People felt we were dying. Now we feel like we are refounding a great American city.”

    For example, inept leaders like former Mayor Ray Nagin and the equally lost Kathleen Blanc have been replaced by more effective figures like Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Gov. Bobby Jindal. Equally important, according to a recent Brookings report, New Orleanians have become noticeably more engaged with their community. Particularly impressive have been improvements in the local schools, once among the nation’s worse. Last year, the majority (61%) of public school students in Orleans Parish (counties in NOLA are called parishes) attended charter schools, which are now attracting some middle class families.

    Most impressive, this once stagnant region has transformed into an entrepreneurial hot bed. “Five years ago people thought we were crazy to be here,” says Matt Wisdom, founder of Turbosquid, a firm with 45 employees that provides three-dimensional images to corporate clients. “Now instead of people being amazed we are here, they want to get here to ride the wave.”

    Walking along Magazine Street from the edge of the Garden District to the Central Business District, you still pass some rough areas. But the way is peppered with scores of independently owned shops and small businesses, many of them opened since the hurricane. Their owners for the most part appear to be younger than 40.

    “We used to have this huge brain drain to the Northeast, the West Coast and Texas, but this has changed,” Williamson says. “After Katrina everyone was forced to become an entrepreneur. The dominant concept for the rebuilding has become one of resiliency and self-employment — it’s been bottom up. It’s become as much of our identity as Mardi Gras or the Jazzfest.”

    Since its founding back in 2000 Idea Village has assisted 1,000 local companies with business plans, financing and focus. Most are small, but some of what Williamson calls post-Katrina generation companies, like Naked Pizza, founded in 2006, have expanded rapidly. Specializing in a healthy, organic version of the traditional high-fat fast food, Naked Pizza has won financial backing from Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban. The company, which employs 40 employees at its New Orleans headquarters, expects to have over 70 franchises by the end of the year  .

    Many rapidly rising businesses specialize in digital media, attracting talent from other places like the West Coast and New York. 37-year-old Kenneth Purcell, founder of Iseatz, moved his entertainment and travel business from New York to NOLA in 2009 and has since grown his company from seven people to 25.

    One big advantage of starting a business in New Orleans is its affordable housing. Based on median price against median household income, the region’s prices are roughly 50% less than those in New York or San Francisco. This is particularly attractive both to middle-aged couples with children who can afford a spacious suburban home that are far less expensive than their equivalents in Los Angeles, Westchester or Silicon Valley.

    It also is attractive to the smaller subset of employees, many of them young, who are drawn to traditional cities. Some New Orleans neighborhoods remind me of pre-1980 Greenwich Village, offering a charming urban environment without either the extortionate price tag or oppressive density.

    Immigration, much of it from Mexico, also is contributing to the regional remake. Over the past decade, as both white and black populations dropped, the Asian population grew by 3000 and Hispanics by 33,500, most of them settling in suburban Jefferson Parish.  Once predominately African-American, New Orleans is returning to its more multi-racial past while re-establishing its strong cultural and social ties to Latin America.

    Yet despite all positive signs, it may be too early to proclaim, as some boosters do, a “New Orleans miracle.” After all, the city’s population remains over 100,000 below its depressed pre-Katrina levels. There are still over 47,000 vacant housing units in the city, many of the uninhabitable, notes Allison Plyer, who runs the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Overall, the recovery remains stronger in the suburbs, many of which suffered less damage from the storm. The share of regional population living in Orleans Parish, where the city of New Orleans is located, has slipped to 29% compared with 37% in 2000. Jefferson Parrish now has more jobs than the city across all income categories.

    Plyer believes the priority for the entire region lies in restoring the higher-paid blue-collar and middle-class jobs that for decades have disappeared from the city.  Young tech and media firms can help gentrify parts of a city, but they are not sufficient to provide opportunities to the vast majority of its residents. To do this, Plyer suggests, the region will have to focus more on “export” oriented jobs in industries such as  energy, manufacturing and trade.

    Critically these fields can provide decent salaries for a broad swath of workers.  Right now, Plyer adds, 45% of the workforce earns less than $35,000 a year, one byproduct of the domination of the generally low-paying tourism industry. Jobs connected to shipping pay twice as much on average as tourism; energy three times as much. A new steel plant announced recently by Nucor in suburban St. James Parish could create more than 1200 jobs with average pay of $75,000 annually.

    “We’ve allowed Houston and Biloxi to move ahead in a lot of these other industries,” she explains.  ”We have to move ahead in engineering and services and energy to compete with Texas. We can’t be just a tourism economy.”

    Ultimately, New Orleans’ long-term recovery may depend on exploiting historic raison d’etre: location. The region  stands astride the primary corridor for the Midwest grain trade and sits in the middle of the Gulf trade routes. It also boasts some of the nation’s richest energy deposits.

    Coupled with its enormous cultural appeal, resurgence in the  more traditional economy could spark the most remarkable urban comeback story of the new century. Once the poster child for urban despair, New Orleans may develop a blueprint for turning a devastated region into a role model not only for other American cities but for struggling urban regions around the world.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo by Adam Reeder

  • Is The Information Industry Reviving Economies?

    For nearly a generation, the information sector, which comprises everything from media and data processing to internet-related businesses, has been ballyhooed as a key driver for both national and regional economic growth. In the 1990s economist Michael Mandell predicted cutting-edge industries like high-tech would create 2.8 million new jobs over 10 years.  This turned out to be something of a pipe dream. According to a recent 2010 New America Foundation report, the information industry shed 68,000 jobs in the past decade.

    Yet this year, information-related employment finally appears to be on the upswing, according to statistics compiled by Pepperdine University economist Michael Shires. The impact of this growth is particularly marked in such long-time tech hot beds as Huntsville, Ala., Madison, Wis., and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, all of which have relatively high concentrations of such jobs.

    The San Jose area, home of Silicon Valley, arguably has benefited the most from the  information job surge. Much of this gain can be traced to the increase in social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all of which have been incubated in the Valley. Good times among corporations  have led many to invest heavily in software productivity tools, while those marketing consumer goods have boosted spending for software and internet-related advertising.

    The 5,000 mostly well-paying information jobs added this year was enough to boost San Jose’s standing overall among all big metros 20 places to a healthy No. 27 in our ranking of the best cities for jobs.

    But as economists enthuse over the tech surge, we need to note the limitations of information jobs even in the Valley. Software and internet jobs, which have increased 40% over the past decade, have not come close to making up for the region’s large declines in other fields, notably manufacturing, construction, business and financial services. Overall, the region has lost 18% of its jobs in the past decade — about 190,000 — the second-worst performance, after Detroit, among the nation’s largest metros. It still suffers unemployment of close to 10%, well above the national average of 9.0%.

    This dual reality can also be seen in the local real estate industry. Office vacancies may be back in the low single digits in some markets popular with social networking firms, such as Mountain View, but they remain around 14 or higher throughout the region — 40% higher than in 2008. No matter how impressive reporters find a new headquarters for high-fliers like Facebook, the surplus of redundant space, particularly in the southern parts of the Valley, suggest we are still far from a 1990s style boom.

    Some observers also warn that the long-term prospects for the Valley may not be as good as local boosters assume.  Analyst Tamara Carleton cites many long-term factors — like the financial condition of local cities and diminishing prospects for less skilled workers — that make it tougher on those who live below the higher elevations of the information economy. She also says that a precipitous decline in foreign immigration could slow future innovation.

    This dichotomy is even more evident in the other big information gainer among our large cities, Los Angeles. Although it is little known by the media or pundit class, the Big Orange actually boasts the nation’s single largest number of information jobs. Its over 5% growth in information jobs translates to roughly 10,000 new positions over the past year. In LA, the big sector for information jobs is likely not social media but traditional entertainment, one of the area’s core industries.

    Yet information growth clearly is not bailing out the overall economy. Other much larger sectors, such as manufacturing and business services, continue to shrink. The area still suffers from an unemployment rate of roughly 12%.

    Other information winners among our large metros include Boston and Seattle, both traditional centers for software-related jobs. These areas have not been as hard-hit by the real estate and industrial declines as their California counterparts, so increasing information employment does not constitute the outlier that we see in the Golden State.

    Less expected gains were notched by some of our other big information sector winners. One big surprise was New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, whose information sector, including a growing film and television industry, expanded almost 39% in past year. As is the case with its strong overall rankings in our best cities survey, the Big Easy’s comeback from the devastation of Katrina is heartening. But we must curb our enthusiasm by pointing out that total regional employment remains 100,000 less than it was before the hurricane.

    Equally intriguing has been the strong performance of Warren-Troy-Farmington, Hills, Mich., and Detroit-Livonia, each of which has benefited from the resurgence of the American auto industry. In these areas, information jobs tend to be tied to the needs of large industrial companies. The state has also waged a major campaign for film and television jobs, as part of an attempt to diversify its economy.

    Yet for all the hype that surrounds industries like media and software, it’s critical to point out that overall this is not a huge employment sector. Even in Seattle — home to Microsoft, Amazon and other software based companies — information jobs account for barely 6% of the total. In Los Angeles, it’s 5%, compared with 10% each for manufacturing and hospitality. In media-centric New York, information accounts for barely 4% of jobs, less than half that of financial services and one-third that of the huge business service sector.

    In most other areas, including those experiencing strong growth, information jobs constitute an even smaller part of the economy. In New Orleans, Warren, Mich., and Detroit, such jobs account for less than 2% of employment . Still, the growth of this sector is a promising one for  economies that have long been dominated, like New Orleans, by the generally low-paying hospitality industry, or in the case of the Michigan cities, the volatile and often chronically hurting manufacturing sector.

    The increase in information jobs, however welcome, should not be sold as a universal elixir for  creating widespread prosperity. Over time, strong regional economies are those that rely on diverse employment sources rather than one.  Growth in high-tech and media jobs can wow impressionable reporters and earn economic developers bragging reights, but they can do only so much to lessen the recession’s impact on the vast majority of workers and the broader regional economy.

    Top Cities for Information Job Growth, 2009-2010
    New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA 38.86%
    Honolulu, HI 25.11%
    Shreveport-Bossier City, LA 18.85%
    Huntsville, AL 14.71%
    Leominster-Fitchburg-Gardner, MA  13.33%
    Redding, CA 10.53%
    Madison, WI 10.20%
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 10.01%
    Grand Rapids-Wyoming, MI 7.63%
    Providence-Fall River-Warwick, RI-MA 6.33%
    Top Big Cities for Information Job Growth, 2009-2010
    New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA 38.86%
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 10.01%
    Providence-Fall River-Warwick, RI-MA 6.33%
    Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA  5.08%
    Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI  3.97%
    Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA  3.54%
    Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 3.46%
    Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC 3.02%
    Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, MI  2.48%
    Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA  1.47%

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Photo by Angelo Amboldi

  • America’s Biggest Brain Magnets

    For a decade now U.S. city planners have obsessively pursued college graduates, adopting policies to make their cities more like dense hot spots such as New York, to which the “brains” allegedly flock.

    But in the past 10 years “hip and cool” places like New York have suffered high levels of domestic outmigration. Some boosters rationalize this by saying the U.S. is undergoing a “bipolar migration”–an argument recently laid out by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. On the one hand the smart “brains” head for cool, coastal cities like New York and Boston, while “families” and “feet”–a term that seems to apply to the less cognitively gifted–trudge to the the nation’s southern tier–a.k.a. the Sun Belt–for cheap prices and warm weather. “College graduates with bachelor’s degrees or higher,” Thompson notes, “have been moving to the coasts, like salmon swimming against the southwesterly current.”

    However, this analysis–no matter how widely accepted in the media–is grossly oversimplified, perhaps even misleading. Indeed, college graduates, for the most part, are heading not to the big cities on the coasts, but to smaller, less dense and quite often Sun Belt cities.

    To come up with our list of the country’s biggest brain magnets, we took the 52 largest metropolitan areas (all those over 1 million population) and ranked them by gains in people with college educations compared to the population over 25 years of age between 2007 and 2009, using the latest data from the American Community Survey provided by demographer Wendell Cox. It turns out that none of the top 10 gainers were large Northeastern cities, but largely Southern or Midwestern. New Orleans; Raleigh, N.C.; Austin, Texas; Nashville; Birmingham, Ala.; Kansas City, Mo.-Kan.; and Columbus, Ohio, all scored high marks. Only one California city, San Diego, made the top 10. Perennial “brain gainers” Denver, Colo., and Seattle round out the top 10.

    Among those metropolitan statistical areas with populations over 5 million, the best ranking went to the Philadelphia region (No. 12 overall), arguably the least glitzy and most affordable of the large northeast cities. The San Francisco metropolitan area, long a leader in its percentage of college-educated adults, held the next spot at No. 13. On the other hand, supposed “brain” magnets Boston and Chicago managed middling rankings, right behind Charlotte, N.C., and just ahead of San Antonio, Texas. Both fell well behind such overlooked “brain gain” areas as Jacksonville, Fla.; St. Louis, Mo.-Ill.; and Indianapolis. New York, the nation’s intellectual capital, ranked a mediocre 29th and Los Angeles an even worse 37th. To put in perspective, Nashville’s rate of college educated migration growth was 3.7%, compared with 1.4% for New York and a measly 0.7% for Los Angeles.

    Rather than following a clear path to the world of the “hip and cool,” college graduates appear influenced by a more nuanced and complex series of factors in terms of their location. New Orleans’ No. 1 ranking, for example, is likely product of the continuing recovery of its shrunken population, where the central city appears to be somewhat more attractive to professionals than before Katrina while the suburban populations have recovered more quickly from the disaster. The strong showing of Birmingham may likely be traced not to changes in the core city itself, but to the rapid growth in its surrounding suburban counties and the rapid expansion of the region’s medical complex.

    This reflects something not often mentioned: the spreading out of intelligence. Conventional theory suggests that the new generation of college graduates will go to the largest, densest places, eschewing, as The Wall Street Journal put it snidely, their parent’s McMansions for small abodes in the inner city. Yet the ACS numbers indicate that, overall, college migrants tend to choose less dense places. In the two years we covered, the growth rate in urban areas with lower urban area densities (2,500 per square mile) boasted a 5% increase in college-educated residents, compared with roughly 3.5% for areas twice as dense.

    This can be seen in the pattern of migration toward relatively low-density metropolitan areas like Nashville, Columbus, Raleigh or Kansas City as opposed to more packed regions like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. And wherever these college graduates migrate, they are at least as likely to settle outside the urban core. Another overlooked fact: Most places with the highest percentages of college-educated people are in suburbs. Only two of the 20 most-educated counties in the country are located in the urban core: New York (Manhattan) and San Francisco. Virtually all the rest are suburban.

    Another somewhat surprising statistic revolves around affordability and job growth. The college-educated, particularly in this tepid economy, are not immune to reality. They may want to go one place–for example, ever-alluring New York or sunny Los Angeles–but may soon find they can find neither a good job there nor an affordable place to live in order to stay there. Overall our analysis shows that many end up in places with lower housing prices. Areas with the highest price housing experienced college-educated growth at a rate only 60% of those with more affordable real estate. This is one thing that makes an Austin or Raleigh, even a Columbus or Kansas City, more attractive than a Boston, New York or Los Angeles

    Finally we have to consider employment trends. For the most part college graduates, like most folks, preferred cities with lower unemployment and more job growth. Some top gainers, such as Raleigh, Columbus and Kansas City, all boast lower than average unemployment and appear to be recovering from the recession. But this is not always the case: Some relatively poor performers on the job front, like Portland, Ore., and San Diego, have managed to maintain their appeal–for now.

    As the economy recovers these patterns are likely to accelerate, although they could also shift a bit as regions gain or lose employment momentum. Meanwhile, the best strategy for attracting graduates lies in creating jobs, as well as in offering both affordable housing and a range of housing options, including both reasonably priced urban and lower-density living. Generally speaking an area that is economically vital as well as physically or culturally appealing will do best. In the next decade advantages will also fall to family-friendly regions, particularly as the current crop of millennial-generation graduates starts entering en masse their family-forming years. These factors, more than hipness or dense urbanity, may well be more influential in determining which regions do best in the ongoing war for talent.

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    No. 1: New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, La.

    Grad Gain: 36,666

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 5.42%

    New Orleans’ No. 1 ranking is likely due to former exiles returning after Hurricane Katrina. A recent report from the Census Bureau estimates that area’s population in the past decade has shrunk 29%. Recovery in the urban core has remained patchy, but suburban populations have recovered more quickly from the disaster.

    No. 2: Raleigh-Cary, N.C.

    Grad gain: 28,748

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 4.27%

    Even in hard times Raleigh-Durham–the fastest-growing metro area in the country–has repeatedly performed well on Forbes’ list of the best cities for jobs. The area is a magnet for technology companies fleeing the more expensive, congested and highly regulated northeast corridor. Affordable housing and short commute times are no doubt highly attractive to millennials seeking to start a family. Indeed, a 2010 Portfolio.com/bizjournals survey ranked the city the third-best for young adults.

    No. 3: Austin-Round Rock, Texas

    Grad gain: 42,117

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 4.23%

    Brains are flocking to Austin for good reason. Forbes ranked it the best large urban area for jobs in 2010. Along with Raleigh-Durham, Austin is emerging as the next Silicon Valley, luring lots of brains who would have previously headed toward the West Coast. Austin owes much both to its public-sector institutions (the state government and the main campus of the University of Texas) and its expanding ranks of private companies–including foreign ones–swarming into the city’s surrounding suburban belt. Its vibrant cultural scene certainly helps in attracting college-educated millennials.

    No. 4: Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn.

    Grad gain: 36,975

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 3.68%

    A high quality of life, a vibrant cultural and music scene and a diverse population make Nashville a desirable place to live. Low housing costs drive down the cost of living, which is even lower than in other affordable cities like Raleigh, Austin or Indianapolis. Nashville is also home to a growing health care industry: More than 250 health care companies have operations in Nashville, and 56 are headquartered there.

    No. 5: Kansas City, Mo./Kan.

    Grad gain: 38,398

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.96%

    The two-state Kansas City region boasts strong population growth and net in-migration– and for good reason. The city has one of the lowest costs of living, one of the highest personal-income growth rates and one of the healthiest real estate markets in the country. Short commute times also add to the attractiveness of the city for families. The city is the second-largest rail hub in the U.S. and is actively growing its life science and technology sectors.

    No. 6: Birmingham-Hoover, Ala.

    Grad gain: 21,111

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.86%

    Birmingham’s strong showing on this list is likely due to the rapid growth in its surrounding suburban counties. One big development sure to lure brains: the rapid expansion of the University of Alabama’s medical center and surrounding private medical industry.

    No. 7: San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, Calif.

    Grad gain: 51,151

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.71%

    The only MSA from the "hip and cool" state of California to make the top 10, despite high levels of out-migration and a relatively poor performance in the job front. For now, at least, the area’s beautiful beaches and idyllic weather manage to attract plenty of college graduates, but it will need to get out of its slump in order to retain them.

    No. 8: Denver-Aurora-Broomfield, Colo.

    Grad gain: 43,853

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.69%

    A perennial magnet for college graduates, and one of the "hip and cool" cities to make the top of our list, Denver was one of the darlings of the information age, and its suburbs have long incubated tech companies. Its technology sector is still strong, but higher prices and greater regulation have driven companies to regions like Austin and Raleigh, which are more business-friendly and cheaper.

    No. 9: Columbus, Ohio

    Grad gain: 29,515

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.6%

    While the recession has taken a huge toll on the rest of Ohio, Columbus has been thriving, thanks to being home of the state capital, a booming startup culture and the largest college campus in the country–Ohio State University, a major employer and information center. Forbes named the Columbus metropolitan area–home to 1.8 million residents– one of America’s best housing markets, as well as one of the best places for businesses and careers. The city enjoys below-average unemployment and a strong tech presence that includes Battelle Memorial Institute, which oversees laboratories for several federal agencies.

    No. 10: Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

    Grad gain: 53,869

    Gain as a Share of Total 25+ 2007 Population: 2.39%

    Seattle has long been one of the big winners in the brain battle as well. It has some of the country’s most important cutting-edge firms–Microsoft, Costco, Amazon, Starbucks–one of the country’s best arrays of urban and suburban neighborhoods. Housing is no longer cheap, but remains far less expensive than its main rival, the San Francisco Bay Area.

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    Photo by Jeanette Runyon

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.